Location awareness has become a useful feature of personal, business and social applications. It is utilized in search, personal content management, entertainment and many other classes of software and online services. There are multiple ways of capturing positioning information on connected desktops and on mobile devices including GeoIP and GPS. These techniques may place documents, personal notes and other types of content on a map and enable multiple location-aware mobile services. Numerous electronic mapping components and features are available from Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, deCarta Maps and other vendors. All such services support multiple zooming levels on high-resolution aerial or satellite images, several map views, including roadmap, satellite, terrain, and, in some cases, street view, directions and many other features, such as, for example, “search nearby” in Google Maps. Social and mass market location aware and location centric applications, such as Facebook, Waze, Yelp, Foursquare, OpenTable, underscore different aspects of dynamically updated and shared mapping capabilities and offer numerous applications of location awareness.
With all advances in mass-market mapping technologies and user experiences with location-aware products and online services, there are still certain shortcomings in existing approaches to visualization and usage of mapping information. This is particularly true for personal content management systems. Zoom levels for maps labeled with personal information (locations of user content capturing sessions) are often too generic and do not display recognizable and memorable geographical objects. Zooming from a world view to specific locations of user interest is non-intuitive, since it may be based on specific label locations rather than on relations between label locations and well-defined and comprehensible geographical objects; geographical zooming and Points of Interest (POIs) are disconnected. Additionally, there is a deficiency of easy and user-friendly methods to reflect time-and-space information on the map, such as reconstructing trip dynamics based on labeled locations. Users of location-aware systems may have difficulty adding labels manually, directly on the map as a follow-up to their trips, meetings or other encounters or extract location info directly from their content.
Accordingly, there is a growing need in user-friendly methods of location-aware organization and mapping of content in personal and business wide content management systems.